Testinlägg Apple closed down the cloud-based Lala music service Friday for reasons unknown, after acquiring it in December. Lala members can still access their online collections, but only until May 31, when Apple will take the service offline completely. When that happens, all the web-based music purchased by Lala members will become unplayable. Unused music credits, which Lala users bought in chunks in order to redeem multiple songs, will become unredeemable. Any MP3s purchased and downloaded from the service will of course continue to play, but this represents a blow to early adopters of Lala’s streaming songs, which only cost 10 cents. “In appreciation of your support,” reads a note on Lala.com that is only accessible to members, “you will receive a credit in the amount of your Lala web song purchases for use on Apple’s iTunes Store.” That means for approximately every 10 songs they bought on Lala, members will get one song from iTunes — and will need to repurchase whatever they’ve bought. Outstanding song credits will transfer to the iTunes music store in equivalent amounts, where they will be redeemable for one-tenth as much music as on Lala. However, that could change soon, if Apple makes Lala the foundation of a new web-based version of iTunes, as most experts agree it will. Neither Apple nor Lala responded to our questions about Apple’s future plans for Lala’s technology, but two options exist going forward.
